Hey! Good morning! I can actually say that this time because it literally is morning. I woke up at 5:45 this morning, which is really unusual for a Sunday. I once tweeted, “I was born a morning person and I will die a morning person”. I completely understand and appreciate that folks have different chronotypes, and am absolutely for any improvement in social flexibility. I really feel sorry for night owls who struggle their entire lives trying to stick to this weird 9–5 business. Being a morning bird, I will forever be chided for being unable to stick around at evening parties for much longer than an hour. Is there, however, a link between being a morning bird and being an introvert? The two give me grief in social situations sometimes.

I am extremely grateful that I have, pretty much, never in my life, experienced insomnia. 🙏🏻 I went to sleep at about 11:45 last night. I’m bad with screen time before bed. I’m not diligent about it, and to be honest, that’s exactly why I don’t judge anyone who looks at a screen until they fall asleep. I don’t think it’s terribly awful to use a screen just before bed or shortly after waking up. If you take regular breaks from a computer or screen during the day, cool. If you don’t let checking your phone in the morning get in the way of you brushing your teeth or exercising, cool. It’s about the overall picture, to be honest.

So anyway, I suppose I got about six hours of sleep. Is this adequate? Only you really know your own sleeping patterns, I guess. There was a brief period of time in the last year where I would wake up before my alarm and be somewhat confused. Apart from the usual need to use the bathroom, I wondered if I should go back to sleep, purely because I had set my alarm for much later.

My problem with going back to sleep when there is only about an hour until my alarm is due to go off, is that I have really fucking weird vivid dreams. I won’t even begin to tell you or describe what they’re like. Actually, I changed my mind, how about I tell you about the one I had yesterday after I went back to sleep for a bit in the morning…

I had a dream that some of my earrings fell out (I have nine piercings, by the way). I was really struggling to try and find them and then put them back in, and even then, in the dream, I was mentally weirded out by this. I was train surfing in some random country, it looked European, with pretty colourful houses and the most perfect green hedges. I left Nick and my family to do touristy stuff while I went train surfing and didn’t really know where I was going, but the train was going so fast. I worried I would lose them if I didn’t get off the train soon. So I get off and I’m climbing these hedges and trying not to disturb them because they’re fucking perfect. Then I run into a man with a brown wide brimmed hat, for some reason I have a hat as well. He asked me for directions to a street named “Australia” but I couldn’t speak whatever language he was speaking. I went running and using the Find My app on my phone to look for Nick and my family. Their icons on the app kept moving really fast, making me panic. I went running to try and catch up to them, as they had gone down further south. I don’t know how they got that far? Did they catch a train too? Shit. I went running past some trolley cars, many which were “parked” by the side of the road. A woman was driving one like an actual car. It was very odd. I eventually found my family playing soccer in a pretty barren looking soccer field with some dogs. In another part of the dream I was hanging out with the cast of Sex Education and watching some of them exchange Christmas gifts they didn’t like, then we had to do a race across a stretch of sand but everyone had to pay $40 when they finished the race. For some reason I was trying to run in bright orange high heels.

My dreams are a bit like that. Super fucking weird, I remember extreme details, even how I was feeling at the time. In telling the story of the previous paragraph, I might tell Nick all the details of my dream and spend a good five to ten minutes explaining all the details. He is definitely really confused as to how or why I do this. I don’t know?! In my mind, in my dream, the dream only lasts probably 90 seconds, but I remember these fucking goddamn details. 😰

So where was I before I got onto fucking weird dreams? Right. If I wake up, go back to sleep, guaranteed I’ll have a fucking weird dream and remember every detail. But I read somewhere that if you wake up, and you ask yourself, “Am I done sleeping?” and the answer is yes, then you don’t really need to go back to sleep.

There are times I wake up and I doubt whether I have had enough sleep, but if I feel “done sleeping”, that’s usually a good indicator. I try not to overthink it. I think the number of hours of sleep one needs can vary. I feel like I slept well last night. Maybe six hours was fine for last night. Quality, not quantity, right?!

So yeah, she’s a morning person through and through. I read somewhere (I know, I haven’t linked to any viable fuckin’ sources in this post) that I might be a Lion chronotype, which means I’m an early bird, blah blah. So, knowing myself, on a good day when I’m not tired at night, I tend to have maximum creativity in the evening. I know that I love to work out in the morning, because if I don’t exercise in the morning, I am distracted and thinking about it until it happens. I also know that if I choose not to exercise first thing in the morning, if I get stuck into some work, I am usually quite productive.

I read some random suggestion that I should exercise in the late afternoon to give myself more energy in the evening, and I should do analytical work in the morning, and save more creative work for the afternoon. Honestly… laugh out loud here, folks. I love (sarcasm) that these suggestions try to improve your productivity based on some “scientific” bullshit and also, uh, productivity porn is a real thing. Productivity doesn’t mean your life is mad-ass successful or that you are happy. Do whatever makes you freaking happy, don’t do what some website suggests to you to be more productive. By all means, experiment and make changes to figure out what works for you, but I’d take that shit with a grain of salt. I’m just glad that this morning I was able to wash my face and do my skincare routine, make a cup of coffee, do the dishes, do some laundry, and sit here and write a blog post or two.

(Here’s the bit about the food poisoning, skip ahead if you like…)

Anyway, the real main topic of this post was supposed to be me harping on about food poisoning. (Content warning for food poisoning symptoms in the next couple of paragraphs.) But I guess it turned into something else. The highlight (heh, nah) of my week was throwing up in my toilet and writhing in pain, clutching my stomach, and having some bad diarrhoea thanks to something I ate. 😵‍💫 It started with gas pain, which I’ve had a couple of times in the past couple of weeks, and I put it down to these stupid fruit and nut bars that are extremely high in fibre. Ew. I regret getting them. I actually bought them over a year ago to eat as a healthy “snack” because they are made of all natural goodness. They taste like shit. I had actually said to Nick that I’d rather clean the toilet than eat one of them again. That bad.

But this time I didn’t have fruit and nut bars; the only thing that was out of the ordinary from what I usually ate was a chicken and rice bowl from the sushi place downstairs for lunch. Hello salmonella?! It was like a few hours later that I had the bad gas pain, and overnight it got worse, and in the morning I was basically struggling to breathe because of the pain.

Man, the vomiting sucked. Do you ever vomit like, nothing? There’s just a bunch of gagging? I vomited actual stuff just a little bit, but mostly it just felt like my stomach was spasming and rejecting whatever the fuck I ate.

I ate bread and soup for a day or so afterwards, and I’m fine now… but I am still extremely cautious of eating anything that will upset my stomach. What the hell, man.

Full disclosure, I have totally had salmonella a couple of time when in Indonesia. 😂 I fully remember staying at my aunt’s place and clutching my stomach in the middle of the night and then not making it to the bathroom in time because the headache and the stomach pain was just so bad I couldn’t walk. Really not fun. Food poisoning is not an experience I recommend, but a part of me finds it somewhat relieving to know that many people have experienced such a thing. I’m weird, I know.

(I’m done with the food poisoning thing now.)

Nick suggested buying pane di casa for making bruschetta. After the food poisoning thing, I wanted to get some bread, so I bought a little loaf and I actually ate a lot of it. It was so soft and nice. I usually don’t love bread or am very particular about how it tastes. I don’t like shit bread. 😛

I can say that I am in a far more positive place mentally. I haven’t felt like I’ve had a “mentally shit” day for a while, which is really nice, to be honest. Work hasn’t been stressful, and being able to go out for brunch has been a nice change of scenery and an opportunity to do something different. I’m feeling less of an addiction to shopping online. Even though I’m still browsing, I feel less like I’m being sucked in, and less tempted by things. I look at stuff, enjoy what I see, maybe note a few things to check on later. I think about whether I need the thing or if I really like it, or if I just like the pictures. I’ve found a bit of joy in wearing certain outfits in my wardrobe again.

I hope I don’t get tired during the day. Otherwise that would be a sign that I didn’t get enough sleep, heh.